We all have limited amount of time to practise (unless you are a professional of course). Sometimes it's 1 hour a day and sometimes even less. But we do want to play well and keep a steady progress. So, what do we do?Let me tell you what NOT to do first. If you wish to get better in time, do not just noodle on the guitar. What is noodling? Picking up the instrument every once in a while to play little bits and pieces for fun, attempting to play the passages you like at full speed, blasting through falsetas you play well, etc. I think you get the picture. There is nothing wrong with noodling. I do it too. But if your goal is to develop your technique, there is another path.Primarily, you need to understand and accept that progress is achieved through time. I get countless emails where people say: "I cannot play such and such passage no mater how hard I try." Sometimes they even send me videos so I tell them what is wrong with their technique. And 9 out of 10, the video shows a person trying really hard to play a complicated passage at full speed. They keep trying over and over again hoping that it will work one day. Let me just say that it is extremely unlikely that you can become a better player by doing this. Maybe a better guitar noodler :-)So before I reveal to you the list of things that you need to do, let me say that I have a very busy schedule and I can practise on average one hour a day and sometime less. I am not one of those musicians that put in solid 6-8 hours every day. I try to make the best use of this limited time by keeping in mind the following:

Anything is playable if you slow it down to a manageable tempo. And I mean ANYTHING! Take your metronome, pick a very slow tempo and try to play the passage that's giving you trouble. Still not working? Slow it down even more. Keep going until you are able to play perfectly at that tempo. Remember this: every time you are making a mistake while practising the passage, you are practising the mistake along with the passage. So, play in slow motion. Do not play the passage fast to check if the practice is yielding results. Do not allow your ears to hear any mistakes.

Only after a proper warmup can you play at your full capacity. This means, during the first 10 - 20 minutes (in my case 40) be gentle with yourself. Don't expect to play perfectly. You can also do a warm up routine with scales and arpeggios before you start working on the main course. Again, the warmup needs to be slow.

Spend quality time with your instrument. In other words, practise with full focus and concentration. If you have 1 hour to practise, then make it an uninterrupted 1 hour. 5 mints here, 10 minutes there throughout the day do NOT add up to a full 1 hour practise. Or if you have, say, only 20 minutes, use every second of that time to focus fully on the piece you are practising. Do not get up to check email or messages, turn off your phone. Also keep in mind that PRACTISING and PERFORMING are two separate things. It's OK to PERFORM of course, but simply performing a piece for 1hour does not equal practising it.

Practise one thing at a time. If you have several pieces that you wish to work on, pick one for each practice session.

Here comes the big question: what to play. In classical guitar, one must play pieces. From start to finish that is… You cannot play a small section of Tarrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra. You have to play all of it! In flamenco, however, it's different. Flamenco guitar music is made up of short musical paragraphs called FALSETAS. Each piece you hear will be made up of these internally complete bits of music. There is not a prerequisite number and order of falsetas for a piece to qualify as 'proper.' Therefore, flamenco is a modularstyle of music with interchangeable parts.

My advice to you: play falsetas and NOT pieces.What do I mean by that? Do not practise, say, Cepa Andaluza (buleria) by Paco de Lucia. Pick some falsetas from it and practise those. Then pick falsetas from another buleria by another artist and practise those too. Then string them together into a new buleria. Every time you practise, change the order of the falsetas.Next thing you know, you will start squeezing in your own falsetas into the modular buleria you have been practising! And that's how you compose in flamenco. You start by playing your master's falsetas. Then in time you add more and more of your own falsetas into your performance, which eventually leads to your own compositions.

This subject line sounds a bit like "How I lost 100 pounds in 2 months," doesn't it?

:-) I even have before and after pictures, so keep reading…

In my previous blogpost I told you about how I started to practise flamenco (The Panaderos Story). Here is what happened after that.

So, the next step for me was to play machine gun picado. All I needed was practice right? I had this picado exercise that I made up in 1990, which then was only an apoyando scale drill for classical guitar. Anyhow, I got back to it. Also, to put things in perspective, I only had about an hour to practise per day. I was doing an MFA in film production and teaching at the university. So, guitar was pretty much a hobby.

Just to focus on speed, I used my hourly practice time solely for this picado exercise. I kept practising. Usually I would start at 100 BPM and raise the tempo slowly. The end result was a failure. My technique got better but speed eluded me. I reached a plateau at around 132 BPM. Some days I'd go a bit faster than that but that's about it.

So, here is the BEFORE picture for you. I posted this video 3 years ago. Skip to the very end to see my fastest performance at the time.

What did I do wrong? My practice was very focused. I raised the tempo incrementally.Played without mistakes with a very good tone, etc. Proper picado seemed out of reach.

Therefore, one of my core beliefs was finally confirmed: you don't acquire picado speed, you need to have been born with it. In other words, you can either play fast or not and no amount of practice will change that. I guess Paco simply had fast fingers.

To use 3-finger picado, you need to pre-design the scale you wish to play. Meaning, you cannot really improvise with it. For the 3-finger picado to function properly, you need to know exactly what finger goes where otherwise your fingers will simply do an ami triplet a for each string ending up with an ugly mess

It is really hard to achieve the punchy flamenco tone with 3-finger picado. Remember my picado speed video. You press your fingers toward the soundboard to get the sound to project properly. But when you do a 3-finger picado run, your concern is to get the right sequence of fingers and you cannot push into the strings, especially with the ring finger.

So, back to the drawing board.

What was the secret?

I looked again at how Paco played picado and thought maybe it's the hand position and shape?

The shape/position of your right hand has got nothing to do with picado tone or speed.

Paco de Lucia DOES NOT play picado only with the tips if his fingers. He plays from the knuckle like everyone else. The efficiency of his technique makes it look like he is only using his fingertips. Also the staccato technique keeps his fingertips always close to the string, and that's why they look motionless when he speeds up.

For picado speed you need to look at the way your fingers MOVE, not the way they look.

Fast picado is NOT the sped up version of slow picado. It is governed by a different set of rules.

This was a BREAKTHROUGH for me. I revised my practice routine. From that point on my process of learning picado was mainly a thought process rather than mindless practice (which I tried before).

I did come up with some principles which seem to work for me at least.

It was in 2003 when I seriously decided to try and play flamenco guitar.I had not touched the instrument for about 5 years. I was terribly rusty. I thought obtaining a flamenco guitar would be a good place to start. So, I purchased a beginner grade Manuel Rodriguez for $400. Later on I realized that this was unnecessary, but that's another story. Panaderos is such a lovely piece and it contains very essential aspects of flamenco guitar: clockwork rhythm, two fundamental rasgueado patterns, picado, pulgar etc. I found acceptably accurate tabs on the web and started practising. As a trained classical guitarist, I started playing very slowly with the metronome, incrementally raising the speed. It sounded good. However, after working on it for about a month (1-2 hours a day), I was unable to play the piece at full tempo. I was completely stuck at around 80 bpm. Beyond that my playing was unpleasant, the tempo would fluctuate and I would frequently miss notes. I kept thinking "Where did I go wrong? I did everything my professor (one of Segovia's students by the way) told me to do!" I kept watching Paco de Lucia to figure out what he was doing to achieve that speed and accuracy. I was about to conclude my quest by declaring lack of talent on my part. Then I thought: "Could flamenco guitar require a DIFFERENT technique than classical guitar?" Here's me as a young classical player (don't laugh :-):

Danza Negra by Antonio Lauro Learning classical guitar I was frequently told by conservatory teachers that flamenco players did not pay attention to technique or tone or articulation blah blah blah… So, as a rule classical training gave you the best possible technique. Well, as it turns out that was completely wrong. Despite many overlapping aspects, flamenco guitar DOES have a a technique of it's own and one needs to understand that and make the necessary adjustments to be able to play flamenco pieces. Besides, tone and articulation are as important in flamenco as they are in classical guitar. Watching Paco de Lucia, Paco Pena, and Manolo Sanlucar on old VHS tapes and DVD's I made my first discovery that changed everything for me:

1-FREE STROKE I always thought flamenco players played melodic lines using rest stroke picado (apoyando). So, I was trying to play everything with rest stroke picado. Wrong! The fact of the matter is that flamenco guitar is played MAINLY with free stroke and they use rest stroke picado only when doing longer runs or if they want to emphasize certain notes. So, the opening melody of Panaderos needs to be played with free stroke.But, that is not all. Here is the second significant discovery:

2- THUMB REST STROKE In flamenco the thumb is used MAINLY as rest stroke. Why? 1- Thumb rest stroke provides an ANCHOR while your fingers move freely "tickling" the trebles. This way, your hand doesn't shake while playing fast passages. 2- By virtue of their special build, flamenco guitars respond better in terms of sound to thumb rest stroke. Simply put, thumb rest stroke will give you the proper buzzy flamenco sound. Alright. Now, here is the kicker:YOU NEED TO PLAY THUMB REST STROKE IN COMBINATION WITH FINGER FREE STROKE Yes! Once I started implementing this new technique, Panaderos started to take off. It was awesome not having to play every single damn note with rest stroke picado and this way, especially with the thumb rest stroke, the piece sounded more flamenco. Then I also realized that flamenco guitar incorporated 2 different hand-wrist positions. The first one used for all of the above and the second for FLAMENCO PULGAR sequences…Let me talk about that some other time…

Most of the time we get so wrapped up in practising to play pieces properly that we overlook the importance of taking care of the machinery that makes all of this possible. My first blog entry was on the importance of warming up prior to playing. There is stuff that needs to be done even before the warm up routine: stretching. There are good finger stretching demos on the internet. Here is one sequence that I do every once in a while. Hold each stretch for 20 seconds.

There are two ways you can use the pulgar (thumb). The first is when the movement originates from the main joint where your thumb is attached to your hand also known as the "trapezio-metacarpal joint." With this technique, you play passages that incorporate both the thumb and the fingers together, such as arpeggios, tremolo, or any other bits that have active and interwoven bass and treble sequences. The free stroke exercise video I posted for my earlier blog entry is a good example for that. The wrist stays as steady as possible while the thumb and the fingers move somewhat independently from each other.

The other pulgar technique is the one where the movement comes from the wrist. Actually, to be precise, the movement originates from "proximal radio-ulnar joint" at the elbow. Your forearm twists a bit to give your whole hand/wrist a radial movement. You keep your thumb as straight and steady as possible and pound on the strings by slightly rotating your wrist. This technique is used quite a bit in flamenco. It generates that loud, buzzy flamenco sound. For students trying to familiarize themselves with the flamenco pulgar, I suggest practising short scales by tucking the index finger underneath your thumb as if holding a pick. This will lock your thumb in position and ensure the movement and the main force come from the wrist. Once you've gotten accustomed to the basic movement, you don't have to squeeze your thumb and index finger together; do this if you are completely unfamiliar with the technique.

It is important to utilize the free stroke. Free stroke is when you do NOT rest your finger on the next string after you make the note. You curve your finger a bit more than you do with rest stroke and pull the tip away from the soundboard after you strike the string making sure you don't touch any other string than the one you've just plucked. The proper place of contact is still the left side of your finger where the nail meets the flesh (similar to rest stroke). The sound of free stroke is less loud and percussive than rest stroke, but the tonal quality should be the same. It's mainly used in arpeggios - for obvious reasons. It is also useful when you need to play melodic passages integrated into arpeggios. Since rest stroke requires some adjustment of the whole right hand position it is not always suitable to play complex passages that incorporate sequences that involve active bass and treble sections that go together. Take a look at the following video as an example for free stroke:

The key is to try and keep the right hand as steady as possible. The thumb and the fingers should move independently while you keep your wrist as steady as possible. I use the following short sequence I've made up to practise free stroke. Give it a try.

If you browse youtube and good web forums (foroflamenco for instance) you can find lots of good advice on picado speed. Check out Grisha, Adam Del Monte, Vahagni, and Juanito Pascual, just to name a few guitarists/videos that I enjoyed and found useful. These players basically say that speed doesn't have to be an innate ability, it can be acquired through practice. There is another video posted by Vahagni on his channel 5 years ago and you can clearly see the progress he's made over the years through proper practice.

Along with the players of my generation I grew up watching Paco de Lucia rip through picado passages like a machine gun and always thought he was one of a kind regarding speed - that no one else could play that fast unless they had god-given speedy fingers. The man is certainly special - we all know that - but seeing many contemporary players play pretty fast picado bits, one realizes it may be possible to develop that muscle.

I don't have much more to say about gaining speed on top of what is already available out there, but just want to share a few points based on my own process. I played classical guitar for a long time and more recently started trying out flamenco. Throughout all those years, I was able to tackle relatively complex pieces but wasn't really fast. I remember practising the first movement of Aranjuez and having to slow down a bit to manage those long ascending and descending scales. I got better at playing in general but speed remained elusive. I worked on three-finger picado for a while to make up for the missing speed in my index and middle fingers. 3-f picado does work to a certain degree but it is difficult to have control over your tone that way and improvisation is difficult as you have to preplan every picado sequence in advance.

Eventually, having seen a few tutorials and some encouragement from fellow players, I did come around to giving regular fast picado a try and realized a few things. Primarily, fast-picado is not really the sped up version of slow picado - it seems to have it's own dynamics. In other words, simply practising a scale over and over again makes you play it better but not necessarily faster. Fast picado is almost a special technique in its own right like rasgueado, tremolo, alzapua, etc. and it is mainly based on utilizing the bursts of speed that you already have in your fingers. To achieve a speed burst, it is useful to practise playing the same note on a single string attempting to play 2, 3, 4 and more notes one after the other in a single burst or a twitch. Take a look at the following video to see what I mean: Picado Speed Right Hand Drill. Also, Grisha talks about something similar when he says "Try to see the scale as one big note rather than a series of notes that sound one after the other." You are, in a sense, trying to access that "twitch muscle" (if there is such a thing physically) that will make your fingers burst out a fast i-m alternation like a whiplash. Once you master that with a few notes, you extend the burst into longer scales. Again, take a look at this video inspired by one of Grisha's drills: Picado Exercise -Speed Bursts - 192 bpm.

Also, your hand needs to be relaxed and unconstrained when you do the burst to avoid spending muscular energy on anything but the burst itself. Just find the best right hand position that works for you to achieve that. In that sense it is better to avoid mimicking the hand positions of other fast players as everybody has a different physical structure. I did start out trying the right hand position of Paco to see if it worked for me but it didn't. My right hand would start hurting after 20 minutes of practice. Just compare my Agility Exercise 4 with Agility Exercise 10 to see how I adjusted my hand position to fit my own needs.

And, as always, don't rush the process. Start with short bursts and add notes slowly.

Practising an instrument is very much like bodybuilding, isn't it? An exceedingly physical act that involves warmup, stretching, muscles, tendons, stamina, endurance, agility, etc. All those things related to moving your body and getting stronger. The physical aspect of playing the guitar is undeniable, sure… But the mental aspect of it should not be overlooked. Actually, many will argue that practising is predominantly an activity of the mind rather than the body. Neurologists say that learning is the process by which new neural connections occur in the brain and through practise these connections strengthen and thicken, so to speak. Every time you practise, the brain will add a new strand to the existing group of connections pertaining to the piece you are working on and the physical representation of the piece in your brain will thicken and become more permanent. They also say that the brain doesn't know the difference between the "real" and the "imagined" input. In other words, it doesn't matter whether you are playing the piece with your hands or in your mind - your mind will not know the difference and treat either as actual practice. There are several controlled experiments all over the world carried out with music students to prove this point. Students are asked to decipher a piece and then practise it for a certain period of time without touching the instrument. Then their progress is compared to the one displayed by the students who did the same amount of practice on the instrument. The results are quite exciting. Looks like, practising in your mind is equally and at times even more effective than its physical counterpart.

Why did I develop an interest in this? I did not play guitar for an extended period of time. I didn't have time or energy. Life got in the way. But, one thing that I never gave up doing was playing guitar in my mind - pretty much all the time! Then whenever I picked up my instrument just to noodle on it bit to relax I was quite surprised to see that I was still able to play - some pieces even better than when I actually practised them. I didn't know why this was at the time. Just assumed that I was lucky or that I practised really well when I learned them. Now I think it was due to my constant mental practise. In this context, I highly recommend this book titled The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. Excellent treatise about neuroplasticity - how you can change your physical brain simply by thinking about it.

These days probably 60% of my practice takes place completely in my head. Meaning, once I've deciphered the piece I'm working on, I set aside time to practise it in my imagination, visualizing my hands, fingers while hearing the music in my mind. Make no mistake, mental practice is not easy. It is not just playing the melody haphazardly in your head. You need to make an effort to imagine yourself on the instrument performing the piece feeling every single note, every single position - left hand, right hand alike. You have to go over difficult passages repeatedly, play some parts slowly just like physical practice. It's surprisingly effective! Also, you don't have to worry about straining your fingers, disturbing the neighbours, wearing out the strings, and you can pick the fanciest, the most expensive guitar you wish to play on. Give it a try...

You cannot play at your full capacity without a proper warmup. If you sit down and start playing something complex you will play it poorly. Your fingers will not reach the required positions in time or fret the notes effectively; your picados will stutter and tone suffer. Doing a bad job is the least serious of the problems brought on by playing with cold hands. Your fingers will hurt. And if your push ahead and try to work your way through the pain, it will get worse. Even if you manage to warm up after a while, the pain and the unpleasant feeling from hearing yourself slaughter the piece will stay for the rest of your practice. By the time you are warmed up, you will have wasted precious time trying to play the piece without paying attention to your tone or timing. Therefore you will not benefit from this activity in terms of progress.

There are cables inside your hands that connect the muscles to the bones. These cables are called "tendons." Tendons transmit the contractions of the muscles to the bones. Playing guitar is a predominantly tendon activity, more significantly in the left hand because it involves lots of pushing. Every time you fret a note you are putting some weight on a particular tendon. Tendons slide back and forth inside tendon sheaths. Imagine a metal wire snugly placed within a plastic pipe… Whenever you move your fingers, the tendons will rub on the insides of the sheaths that hold them. So, it is extremely important to get this narrow tendon passage "lubricated" without causing small tears and abrasions due to friction. And how is this done? Through a proper warm up. When your hands are cold, the tendons are dry and they will rub against the sheaths causing tiny tears especially when you perform stretches. If you insist on playing difficult stuff with no proper lubrication you may generate so much damage that the scar tissue on the tendons and the sheaths will prevent you from moving your fingers, it will hurt like hell and you'll end up with the much dreaded "tendonitis." How do I know all this? Because it happened to me. Preparing for an album recording, I practised very complex stuff without proper warmup and then I had to stop playing for 6 months. Once you get tendonitis, you cannot get rid of it completely. It will flare up every time you force your hands or play a long gig, etc.

The only way to lubricate your tendons and prepare them for heavy-duty playing is warmup. When you pick up your guitar for practice, start playing passages that require almost no effort. I always begin by slowly placing my fingers on the frets, hammering a few notes, doing some legatos and slides. Gradually increase the force you put on the fretboard. Do not do any stretches at the beginning. Ease yourself into difficult positions. It takes me about half an hour to start playing pieces properly at half speed. Only at the end of an hour do I manage to use my full technique.